Performance Evaluation of Balanced Pension Plans

This paper examines the ability of balanced pension plan managers to successfully time the equity and bond market and select the appropriate assets within these markets. In order to evaluate both market timing abilities in these balanced pension plans, we extend the traditional equity market timing models to also account for bond market timing. As far as we know, we are among the first to apply this multifactor timing model to investigate equity and bond market timing simultaneously. This performance evaluation has been conducted on two samples of Spanish balanced pension plans, one with Euro Zone and one with World investment focus. This allows us to decompose managers’ skills in three components: selectivity, equity market timing, and bond market timing. Our findings suggest that the average stock picking ability of pension plans is positive. World schemes tend to have positive bond timing skills, while Euro Zone pension plans are on average not able to time equity or bond markets

Telegram in campaign: the use of mobile instant messaging services in electoral political communication

The use of mobile instant messaging platforms has increased in recent years in political communication given the private nature of this form of communication, a trend which has increased during the COVID-19 pandemic. The aim of this research is to know the Telegram usage done by the main political parties within the election campaign. For this purpose, the Catalan election of the 14th of February 2021 are studied with a quantitative content analysis on a sample composed of 600 messages published by five political parties (PSC, Vox Barcelona, ERC, Junts per Catalunya, CUP and En Comú Podem). Results show that one of the most important functions of this platforms is the information and dissemination of its electoral programme. Regarding the main topics, the organization and functioning of the campaign and the political wrangling predominate. Our findings show that the position of the different parties regarding the independence of Catalonia, their political trajectory and their position within the government/opposition axis are conditioning factors of their communication strategy on this platform. Finally, the analysis of the public impact of the published messages reveals the disconnection between the parties and the citizens. In addition, a “more is more” effect which determines that the more messages are broadcast on this platform, the greater the number of views by users is, is detected. These data reveal new evidence on how Telegram is being used in the election campaign by political actors.El uso de plataformas de mensajería instantánea móvil se ha incrementado en los últimos años en la comunicación política dado el carácter privado de esta forma de comunicación, tendencia que se ha incrementado durante la pandemia del COVID-19. El objetivo de esta investigación es conocer el uso de Telegram por parte de los principales partidos políticos dentro de la campaña electoral. Para ello se estudian las elecciones catalanas del 14 de febrero de 2021 con un análisis de contenido cuantitativo sobre una muestra compuesta por 600 mensajes publicados por cinco partidos políticos (PSC, Vox Barcelona, ​​ERC, Junts per Catalunya, CUP y En Comú Podem). Los resultados muestran que una de las funciones más importantes de estas plataformas es la información y difusión de su programa electoral. En cuanto a los temas principales, predomina la organización y funcionamiento de la campaña y la disputa política. Nuestros hallazgos muestran que la posición de los diferentes partidos respecto a la independencia de Cataluña, su trayectoria política y su posición dentro del eje gobierno/oposición condicionan su estrategia comunicativa en esta plataforma. Finalmente, el análisis del impacto público de los mensajes publicados revela la desconexión entre los partidos y la ciudadanía. Además, se detecta un efecto “más es más”, que determina que cuantos más mensajes se emiten en esta plataforma, mayor es el número de visualizaciones por parte de los usuarios. Estos datos revelan nuevas evidencias sobre cómo los actores políticos están utilizando Telegram en la campaña electoral

Political agenda on Twitter during the 2016 Spanish elections: issues, strategies, and users’ responses

In recent years, political communication has been marked by an increased use of social media. Platforms such as Twitter have become an essential tool for political actors, especially during electoral campaigns. The aim of this study is to analyse the use of Twitter by Spanish political actors to build their agenda during electoral campaigns. The implementation strategy and users’ responses were also analysed. A quantitative content analysis was conducted, which was complemented by a metric evaluation. The sample was taken from the general election of 26 June 2016. The profiles of the four political parties most popularly represented in Spain (Partido Popular, Partido Socialista, Podemos, and Ciudadanos) and their leaders (Mariano Rajoy, Pedro Sánchez, Pablo Iglesias, and Albert Rivera respectively), were analysed. A total of 9,049 tweets were studied and the results allowed us to detect various parameters of the management of political agendas on Twitter during the electoral campaign. Among them, it is worth highlighting: the existence of different forms of agenda-setting interactions built by the parties and articulated by the leaders, the low degree of thematic fragmentation, the prevalence of a game frame, the identification of three conditioning factors, and the detection of dissonance between the agenda built by politicians and the interests of the users of this platform

Consistency of a nonword repetition task to discriminate children with and without developmental language disorder in Catalan-Spanish and European Portuguese speaking children

Nonword repetition has been proposed as a diagnostic marker of developmental language disorder (DLD); however, the inconsistency in the ability of nonword repetition tasks (NRT) to identify children with DLD raises significant questions regarding its feasibility as a clinical tool. Research suggests that some of the inconsistency across NRT may be due to differences in the nature of the nonword stimuli. In this study, we compared children’s performance on NRT between two cohorts: the children in the Catalan–Spanish cohort (CS) were bilingual, and the children in the European Portuguese cohort (EP) were monolingual. NRT performance was assessed in both Spanish and Catalan for the bilingual children from Catalonia-Spain and in Portuguese for the monolingual children from Portugal. Results show that although the absolute performance differed across the two cohorts, with NRT performance being lower for the CS, in both Catalan and Spanish, as compared to the EP cohort in both, the cut-points for the likelihood ratios (LH) were similar across the three languages and mirror those previously reported in previous studies. However, the absolute LH ratio values for this study were higher than those reported in prior research due in part to differences in wordlikeness and frequency of the stimuli in the current study. Taken together, the findings from this study show that an NRT consisting of 3-, 4-, and 5-syllable nonwords, which varies in wordlikeness ratings, when presented in a random order accurately identifies and correctly differentiates children with DLD from TD controls the child is bilingual or monolingual.This research was funded by the National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders (NIDCD) Grant [R0105263] awarded to Dr. Evans, from The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Grant [P30HD03352] awarded to the Waisman Center, The University of Wisconsin Madison; by the Ministerio de Economía y Competitividad Grant [2016EDU2016-75368-P/BES-2014-070511] awarded from Dr. Andreu and from the Agència de Gestió d’Ajuts Universitaris i de Recerca (AGAUR) de la Generalitat de Catalunya [2017SGR387] awarded to the Grup de Recerca en Cognició i Llenguatge (UOC-UB); by the CIEd—Research Centre on Education, Institute of Education, University of Minho, projects [UIDB/01661/2020] and [UIDP/01661/2020], through national funds of FCT/MCTES-PT

Explainable Artificial Intelligence Based Analysis for Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience

In the last decades, non-invasive and portable neuroimaging techniques, such as functional near infrared spectroscopy (fNIRS), have allowed researchers to study the mechanisms underlying the functional cognitive development of the human brain, thus furthering the potential of Developmental Cognitive Neuroscience (DCN). However, the traditional paradigms used for the analysis of infant fNIRS data are still quite limited. Here, we introduce a multivariate pattern analysis for fNIRS data, xMVPA, that is powered by eXplainable Artificial Intelligence (XAI). The proposed approach is exemplified in a study that investigates visual and auditory processing in six-month-old infants. xMVPA not only identified patterns of cortical interactions, which confirmed the existent literature; in the form of conceptual linguistic representations, it also provided evidence for brain networks engaged in the processing of visual and auditory stimuli that were previously overlooked by other methods, while demonstrating similar statistical performance

Biomarker Research and Development for Coronavirus Disease 2019 (COVID-19): European Medical Research Infrastructures Call for Global Coordination

An effective response to the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic requires a better understanding of the biology of the infection and the identification of validated biomarker profiles that would increase the availability, accuracy, and speed of COVID-19 testing. Here, we describe the strategic objectives and action lines of the European Alliance of Medical Research Infrastructures (AMRI), established to improve the research process and tackle challenges related to diagnostic tests and biomarker development. Recommendations include: the creation of a European taskforce for validation of novel diagnostic products, the definition and promotion of criteria for COVID-19 samples biobanking, the identification and validation of biomarkers as clinical endpoints for clinical trials, and the definition of immune biomarker signatures at different stages of the disease. An effective management of the COVID-19 pandemic is possible only if there is a high level of knowledge and coordination between the public and private sectors within a robust quality framework.Peer reviewe

Synthetic inhibitors of bacterial cell division targeting the GTP-binding site of FtsZ

Cell division protein FtsZ is the organizer of the cytokinetic Z-ring in most bacteria and a target for new antibiotics. FtsZ assembles with GTP into filaments that hydrolyze the nucleotide at the association interface between monomers and then disassemble. We have replaced FtsZ's GTP with non-nucleotide synthetic inhibitors of bacterial division. We searched for these small molecules among compounds from the literature, from virtual screening (VS), and from our in-house synthetic library (UCM), employing a fluorescence anisotropy primary assay. From these screens we have identified the polyhydroxy aromatic compound UCM05 and its simplified analogue UCM44 that specifically bind to Bacillus subtilis FtsZ monomers with micromolar affinities and perturb normal assembly, as examined with light scattering, polymer sedimentation, and negative stain electron microscopy. On the other hand, these ligands induce the cooperative assembly of nucleotide-devoid archaeal FtsZ into distinct well-ordered polymers, different from GTP-induced filaments. These FtsZ inhibitors impair localization of FtsZ into the Z-ring and inhibit bacterial cell division. The chlorinated analogue UCM53 inhibits the growth of clinical isolates of antibiotic-resistant Staphylococcus aureus and Enterococcus faecalis. We suggest that these interfacial inhibitors recapitulate binding and some assembly-inducing effects of GTP but impair the correct structural dynamics of FtsZ filaments and thus inhibit bacterial division, possibly by binding to a small fraction of the FtsZ molecules in a bacterial cell, which opens a new approach to FtsZ-based antibacterial drug discovery.This work was supported by grants from Plan Nacional de Investigación BFU 2011-23416 (J.M.A.), BFU2099-09552 (P.C.), and SAF2010-22198 (M.L.L.-R.), grant CM S2010/BMD-2353 (M.L.L.-R, P.C., J.M.A.), and fellowships FPI (L.B.R.-A.), FPU (M.A.) and CSIC-JAE (E.R.-A.)

Targeting bacterial cell division protein FtsZ with small molecules and fluorescent probes

Trabajo presentado en el 248th National Meeting of the American-Chemical-Society (ACS), celebrado en San Francisco, CA (Estados Unidos), del 10 al 14 de agosto de 201

Tackling the translational challenges of multi-omics research in the realm of European personalised medicine : A workshop report

Personalised medicine (PM) presents a great opportunity to improve the future of individualised healthcare. Recent advances in -omics technologies have led to unprecedented efforts characterising the biology and molecular mechanisms that underlie the development and progression of a wide array of complex human diseases, supporting further development of PM. This article reflects the outcome of the 2021 EATRIS-Plus Multi-omics Stakeholder Group workshop organised to 1) outline a global overview of common promises and challenges that key European stakeholders are facing in the field of multi-omics research, 2) assess the potential of new technologies, such as artificial intelligence (AI), and 3) establish an initial dialogue between key initiatives in this space. Our focus is on the alignment of agendas of European initiatives in multi-omics research and the centrality of patients in designing solutions that have the potential to advance PM in long-term healthcare strategies.Peer reviewe

Therapeutic potential of the novel hybrid molecule JM-20 against focal cortical ischemia in rats

Context: Despite the great mortality and morbidity of stroke, treatment options remain limited. We previously showed that JM-20, a novel synthetic molecule, possessed a strong neuroprotective effect in rats subjected to transient middle cerebral artery occlusion. However, to verify the robustness of the pre-clinical neuroprotective effects of JM-20 to get good prognosis in the translation to the clinic, it is necessary to use other experimental models of brain ischemia. Aims: To evaluate the neuroprotective effects of JM-20 following the onset of permanent focal cerebral ischemia induced in rats by thermocoagulation of blood into pial blood vessels of cerebral cortices. Methods: Ischemic lesion was induced by thermocoagulation of blood into pial blood vessels of primary motor and somatosensory cortices. Behavioral performance was evaluated by the cylinder testing for a period of 2, 3 and 7 days after surgery, and was followed by histopathological study in brain cortex stained with hematoxylin- eosin. Results: Ischemic injury resulted in impaired function of the forelimb evidenced by high asymmetry punctuation, and caused histopathological alterations indicative of tissue damage at cerebral cortex. JM-20 treatment (4 and 8 mg/kg) significantly decreased asymmetry scores and histological alterations with a marked preservation of cortical neurons. Conclusions: The effects of permanent brain ischemia were strongly attenuated by JM-20 administration, which expands and improves the current preclinical data of JM-20 as neuroprotector against cerebral ischemia, and strongly support the examination of its translation to the clinic to treat acute ischemic stroke